If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

More Details On The OpenGL Situation In KDE's KWin

09-12-2010, 05:20 PM

Phoronix: More Details On The OpenGL Situation In KDE's KWin

A week ago we reported on the open-source GPU drivers causing headaches for KDE users when attempting to use the KWin compositing manager under certain conditions. Version 4.5 of the KDE Software Compilation has a few improvements to KWin and while the compositing manager does check for optional OpenGL extensions, the open-source Mesa drivers don't always do things right and it's resulted in some bugs and other issues inflicting KDE users...

His hardware is supported by Mesa (and very well so), but when he's too lazy to install the drivers and relies on what is shipped by his outdated distro (or choose another distro), well, that's not a good thing for a developer, to put it kindly.

Comment

Well, apparently he's an unpaid volunteer doing all this in his free time. So if he just wants to develop for the Nvidia blob, then that's his right. IMO the failure here is with KDE for relying on him to provide such an essential part of the desktop.

Comment

The point is that he claims that he doesn't "want" to develop for the blob but that he doesn't have any other choice, which is not true. He can update his X/Mesa/Driver stack on his own or switch to another distro.

Comment

His hardware is supported by Mesa (and very well so), but when he's too lazy to install the drivers and relies on what is shipped by his outdated distro (or choose another distro), well, that's not a good thing for a developer, to put it kindly.

That's a pretty lame excuse. Xorg/Mesa drivers are the broken components, not KWin. That's a fact.
Those paid full-time Xorg/Mesa programmers should get off their lazy asses and fix their god damn drivers.

Comment

That's a pretty lame excuse. Xorg/Mesa drivers are the broken components, not KWin. That's a fact.
Those paid full-time Xorg/Mesa programmers should get off their lazy asses and fix their god damn drivers.

And what does this have to do with a KWin dev not wanting to test his code against the open drivers, allowing him to file bug reports to X.Org? Which is entirely up to him, I'll give you that, but why make excuses about an imaginary inability to do so?

Comment

what ?! what a giant pile of FUD >
i have radeon 4730 (_R770_) with mesa(no gallium), libdrm, xf86-video-ati from git and 2.6.35 kernel AND KDE 4.5.1. compositing works fine (even though i don't use it and enable only once in a while to test driver updates) and X never crashes.

"blur" effect does not blur anything however - all still looks clear as it wasn't enabled (or maybe there is some obscure misconfiguration) but there is no such thing as artefacts or crashes.
...if you not count shitload of regressions in "OMG-stable-bug_fixing-4.5-release" of KDE which constantly kill kwin (effects disabled) and make plasma leak memory.

if you use something like "Debian Stable" it doesn't mean your system automatically becomes, literally, stable as rock. it means that your system preventing you from encountering any drastic changes - _good and bad_.
i'm sorry that we live in a world where corporate greed and stupidity result in shitty work of otherwise functioning product but there are efforts to change that and very fruitful ones.
and in order to benefit from those you MUST get ahold of those changes _or_ wait for their "stabilization" and point your attention in other areas for a time being.

it's not optional, it's either former or later.
but dude "just doesn't have a time" for such silliness.
probably, it "should just work" ? riiiight...

and, "lack of communication" my ass. he doesn't even try to answer to Marek Ol??k there and here - OSS graphic stack developers all over the damn place.

his only problem is that he do NOT CARE MUCH.
but it's ok - "desktop effects" is a useless bullshit anyway. unless there is some truly 3D desktop environment based on different usability concepts and not just fake sense of depth it's all just doesn't matter much.